Editor's File: There's always a trade-off with energy

Across Missouri's northern tier wafts what farmers call the smell of money.

By Bob Unger

Across Missouri's northern tier wafts what farmers call the smell of money.

You and I call it pig stink.

It comes from the feces and urine of hundreds of thousands of hogs in confinement in the 70 or so big corporate hog farms owned by Premium Standard Farms, which reek for miles and miles.

Living with that stink is miserable, but the good people of Princeton, Mo., and the other towns and hamlets across five vast counties have made a hard bargain they mostly live with. Since early in the last century, people have been leaving the farms of northwest Missouri, where entire counties lost half their population. And rather than continue to kiss their children goodbye as they left for Chicago, St. Louis and New York to find mates and jobs, Missourians mostly welcomed PSF and the jobs and dollars that came with the company.

Not everyone was happy, of course, and there have been two multi-million dollar awards in hog odor cases; PSF has threatened to leave Missouri altogether for a friendlier place to do business. If there is such a place.

There are bargains made in towns and cities everywhere, trade-offs that involve swapping economic benefits for some risk, regular annoyance and occasional disaster. If those bargains were struck long enough ago, people have mostly learned to live with them.

When I was a little boy growing up in the Corona section of Queens, N.Y., I ate, slept and played amid the low-frequency thunder of the approaching elevated train along the Flushing line and the sharp metallic screech as the trains made the sharp curve into the 103rd Street station every few minutes. If the wind was blowing in the right direction and the windows were open, you had to nearly shout to talk with the person sitting across the table from you.

But by then the subway already had been running for 40 years, and it wasn't going away no matter how much it might still have bothered Mrs. Franzoni next door. It was part of the bargain that people all over the city had made to get them in and out of Manhattan long before everyone owned a car.

In Southeastern Massachusetts, we will have to live at least another 20 years with the bargain we made back in 1972 to allow the opening of a new nuclear power plant in historic Plymouth. That is the result of a decision Friday by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to re-license the plant despite lingering worries about the potential for disaster on a scale similar to that which occurred in March 2011 at the similarly designed Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.

It is part of an economic bargain we make to keep the lights turned on at an affordable price, and we jointly decide to live with the risks and not to think about them too much. A lot of people aren't comfortable having for a neighbor a nuclear power plant that will operate long past the time of its planned obsolescence and long after the terror at Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I doubt we would allow anyone to build that plant today, but these are different times. And is burning oil or gas any better? Is the bargain any better?

Some of the great trout streams of central Pennsylvania will be ruined by the hydraulic "fracking" for natural gas in the shale beneath the mountains. Burning oil at $4 a gallon is not an answer we can afford, especially when much of it comes from the unstable oil states of the Middle East. And good luck trying to convince coastal residents anywhere to build a new oil refinery.

And yet, events of the past few months have demonstrated that even benign and renewable energy sources like commercial wind or solar are met by the furies of homeowners who are worried about their property values, their health or both.

On a windy Sunday recently, my wife and I tromped around the two 397-foot wind turbines that have been met with fierce opposition by some in Fairhaven, just to get a sense of the noise and the visual upset caused by the shadow flicker of the turbines' turning blades. We stood upwind and down, with the sun at our backs and in our faces, and the whine of lawn-mowers 100 yards away and the constant bird-song were far more pronounced than the whoosh of the blades.

"I could live with that," I said.

But then, we were only there for an afternoon; and, besides, I suspect that almost anything seems quiet compared to growing up under the Flushing line in Queens. (When I went away to college in New Haven, Conn., I couldn't sleep for a week because the nights were too quiet).

So the economic bargain that Fairhaven made to trade some of the peace and quiet near Little Bay for millions of dollars in energy savings is just the kind of bargain Americans have always made.

Except people who live in nice suburbs outside the din of the cities are less willing to make those bargains. After all, they moved to the suburbs to escape the din. Still, most of us like air-conditioned offices and streetlights.

A hard bargain any way you slice it.

Bob Unger is the editor and associate publisher of SouthCoast Media Group, the publisher of The Standard-Times and SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached by email at runger@s-t.com or phone at 5080979-4430.

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